World languages

Last summer was a cruel one for the great emblems of Italian cinema. First, at the end of July, came the death of Michelangelo Antonioni, the great modernist director who electrified the art-house in the 60s and 70s. Then, on August 9, a fire broke out at Rome's legendary Cinecitta film studios, destroying about 35,000 sq ft of what had been the lynchpin of the nation's film industry since the 1930s. Italy's golden age was over. These twin losses, within the space of a fortnight, only served the highlight the fact.

Decline is relative, of course, and the Italian industry is surely still regarded with envy by many other EU member states - Lithuania, say, or Luxembourg. It boasts a healthy output and an eclectic crop of distinctive directors, ranging from the icy Paolo Sorrentino to the clownish Roberto Benigni and the mercurial Nanni Moretti, who won the 2001 Palme d'Or for his family drama The Son's Room. It is simply that Italian film lacks the impact and the global reach that it enjoyed in the days of Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Bertolucci and the Taviani brothers.

To add insult to injury, the slide of Italian cinema has been mirrored by a rapid ascent for Spanish film.

Both industries found themselves liberated, in part, by the end of fascist rule. The trouble was that Italy's freedom came earlier. The hardships of the post-war era were perversely the best thing that could have happened to Italian film. They brought an end to hide-bound, propaganda movies and paved the way for the rise of neorealism – a strain of deft social dramas, like Bicycle Thieves, that were shot on the cheap, in natural locations and reflected life as it was being lived on the ground.

Spain's liberation came later, with the end of the Franco regime in 1975. Previously, awkward, uncompromising directors such as Luis Bunuel had found themselves exiled from their homeland. Now there was a place for them again. Over in Madrid, a former comic-book writer called Pedro Almodovar tapped into the mood of the time with a series of jubilant, sexually precocious and taboo-baiting works before going on to become a revered elder statesman courtesy of films such as Volver and All About My Mother. In the meantime, many actors who got their first breaks on Almodovar productions – Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem – are now installed as household names.

But the current state of Spanish cinema is not down to one man alone. Crucially, the country's film industry appears to have benefited from globalisation, allowing it to access major export markets in Latin America and even the US, with its millions of Spanish speakers. Recent years have seen a vibrant cross-pollination with the Mexican film industry - most obviously seen with the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth and the forthcoming The Orphanage - together an unprecedented rise in English-language Spanish productions such as Goya's Ghosts, Basic Instinct 2 and Alejandro Amenebar's The Others, starring Nicole Kidman as a harassed mother battling ghosts on the Channel Islands.

All of which conspires to make Spanish cinema feel fresher, more vital, more outward-looking than its counterpart across the Mediterranean.

Two decades ago, Italians bought twice as many cinema tickets as they did in Spain. Now the Spaniards have overtaken them. Italian cinema has a long and illustrious history, and now is not the time to start talking in terms of a decline and fall - we are not quite in Gibbon territory yet. But the industry gives the impression of being tired and scattered, struggling to find its voice. It sorely needs another neorealist-style renaissance - a local, specific flowering that speaks to the world at large.

The situation in Spain could hardly be more different. Politics has been a deadly serious affair here for as long as anyone can remember. Or, just plain deadly. When Generalissimo Franco died in 1975, the country began a long and steady ascent from its ignominious role as a philistine fascist dictatorship into the strong and much respected democratic monarchy that it is today. There was much for architects to do. Entire cities, despised by Franco, such as Barcelona and Bilbao, had suffered decades of neglect and under-investment, while hundreds of miles of beautiful coastline had been despoiled by trashy tourist resorts and famously unfinished concrete hotels.

From the 1980s, Barcelona became a showcase of how to revitalise a once magnificent city that had fallen on hard times. A lively new cultural scene, together with a sudden flux of superb bars, restaurants and nightclubs, was matched and mirrored by a thoroughgoing plan, led for many years by the architect Oriol Bohigas, to raise the design standards, and so lift the spirits, of the city's public plazas.

Championed by the socialist mayor, Pasqual Maragall, who held office from 1982 to 1997, and was later elected president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona became an international byword for successful "urban regeneration." And, for better or worse, Maragall and the experience of Barcelona in the 80s and 90s, are very much a part of the reason why London has an elected mayor and city assembly today.

From the late 1970s, other Spanish cities came back to life, spurred on not just by a general sense of liberation, and new-found social, religious, legal and political freedoms, but by a huge, and generally intelligent, investment in public projects, notably in architecture and urban planning. Entire cities may have been transformed, and very much for the better, and yet any number of small towns began to build distinguished modern town halls, schools, libraries, museums, often on a small-scale, but to an exceptional, and critically acclaimed, quality. Here is one country you can visit today where you will find unabashed, yet small-scale, modern buildings complementing and enhancing the look and feel of age-old regional towns.

Spanish architects, meanwhile, began to emerge on the global stage, among them the urbane Rafael Moneo, the spirited Santiago Calatrava and the outlandish Ricardo Bofill. A younger generation soon followed, with Enric Miralles and his Italian-born wife and business partner, Benedetta Tagliabue, invited to design the adventurous, costly and highly controversial Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh, and Alejandro Zaera Polo, whose London-based practice, Foreign Office Architects, founded with his Iranian-born wife, Farshid Moussavi, made their name with the superb port authority terminal at Yokohama, which opened in 2002.

Renaissances in architecture and design, occur when certain cultural and political fuses are lit; for a while these have gone out in Italy, although probably not forever. A week, as Harold Wilson once said, is a long time in politics (a very long time indeed in Italy) and anything can happen. In Spain, that fuse was lit when Franco died, and the cultural fireworks that have lit up Spanish towns and cities have yet to fall to Earth and into the mire of quixotic politics.

Again Guest69, that was a fair assesment of the situation today. Thanks for the insight.

For French speakers that can't read Spanish so well, he wasn't bashing French at all, but simply being realistic about the trends of languages in the world today. Also, he pointed out that French and Spanish aren't really in any direct conflict for superiority anywhere. That is left to other languages.

I think that the only neutral place where there could be a conflict between Fr and Sp would be in US schools, but Spanish has already established itself as no.1 there.

So how can Spain overtake Italy in per capita? The information in the article were purely lies and I believe that it was written by a Hispanic.

Guest Thu Mar 20, 2008 11:11 am GMT

<< Hasta la polla de estos hijos de puta >>

Va te faire foutre avec ta petite chiene, merde!

Guest Thu Mar 20, 2008 11:48 am GMT

English Translation of Guest69's message.

<< To finish my previous exposure, people-said that the French language is very French as a foreign language spoken, and defend this aspect in relation to the Spanish.

I remember that the French language was the language diplomatic of the world in 1900. Everyone knows that the Americans won two world wars. Since 1945, diplomatic language became English.

However, this is not automatic and many people in the world still studied French in the 50, 60 and 70. In 80, 90 and considerably fewer people. In the past 10 years even less. This is very important. It should be noted the trend of the past 20-30 years. Clearly, the French language is still live on incomes of the past, but the trend is downward.

For example, in Vietnam the French is spoken by very elderly people. Most of the French-speaking people of Vietnam are more than 60 years. The younger generation speak English and studying. All this can be extrapolated to other countries.

Another important point is that the Frenchman is not a foreign language in the former French Africa. For example, studies in Senegal or Ivory Coast as a second language, but there is not exactly a foreign language.

Ultimately, the Frenchman is still very spoken as a foreign language, but among its speakers the proportion of very old people is high. Youth from around the world are studying English.

It is true that if the Frenchman loses importance, a large benefited strategically is Spanish, as is the Chinese, as the two are fighting for a theoretical second position, but, and this is important, IN ANY CASE THE SPANISH AND FRENCH PELEAN DIRECTLY in any country.

The funny thing is that the language has become even more damage to the French is THE ENGLISH AND SPANISH THE NO. The French wanted to play the role of second language globally, and there is only one, the English. Globalization has done much damage to the French. An African understood the world can study French or English, and the tendency is to consider the second.

Another language with which the French have to fight is the arabic. The Arabic and French are spoken in North Africa, and there shared cultural influence. The English and Arabic are the languages they can do damage to the French, not Spanish.

So, this fight between the Spanish and French, although entertaining, does not make much sense.>>

English can only do damage in French in Asia not in Africa. As a matter of fact most Engish speaking Africans from ex-british Africa speak French like in the case of Kofi Annan of Ghana and Boutros Boutros Ghali of Egypt and both were from countries formerly ruled by the brits. English speaking Africans speak French when they mingle with Franco;lhone Africans. French is required in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and even Liberia and South Africa. While English is just optional in Frncophone Africa.

Ironically, Egypt is a member of La Francophonie not of Commonwealth and French is prefererred by many there over English because they fear that too much emphasis on English could kill their very own culture so French has a very strong presence there. French is the language of commerce, media, and government in Maghreb.

English killed the Spanish language in the Philippines, Marianas, and Guam. In the Philippines, there are only 2,000+ native speakers of Spanish. Majority of the Spanish descent there speak English or Tagalog as their first language not Spanish. French, Japanese, German, and Italian are now more studied as a foreign language than Spanish there. In Marianas and Guam the people speak a Spanish creole known as Chamorro as their native language. The people of these 3 countries carry Spanish surnames and they were ruled by Spain for 300+ years and ended in the 1890's. Just compare the situation in Mauritius where it was just colonized by France in early 17th century but was taken over by the British after the Napoleonic Wars. One can expect that the islkand would be anglicized completely since it was totally cut-off from France. But this did not happen in fact French is the preferred language there even by the Indian and Chinese ethnic groups.

It's very likely that Guarani in Paraguay; Quechua and Aymara in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador; Quiche in Guatemala; Nahuatl in Mexico; Portunhol in Uruguay; Italian in Argentina; Portunhol in Uruguay; Catalan, Galician, Basque, Asturian, Aragonese, and Leonese in Spain; and the numerous Spanish variants in other Hispanic countries can do not just damage on Castellano but kill it.

So, I advise these Hispanics to stop waiting for that day that Spanish will become the 2nd most important. It won't happen because of the strong presence of French, Russian, German, and Italian. it would play a less important role than these languages.

So, this fight between the French, and Spanish is entertaining because of the misinformation posted by the fanatics in this forum and that what makes this topic non-sense.

So how can Spain overtake Italy in per capita? The information in the article were purely lies and I believe that it was written by a Hispanic.

Guest Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:07 pm GMT

Spanish films is popular in hispanic America not in the US, Asia, Africa, and other European countries. They find hispanic films with poor budgets and mostly dramas because the producers could not make sci-fi films that require technological knowhow and huge budget which obvioulsy they do not have.

Italian films on the other hand are far more popular in Europe than Spanish films becuase of their experience in creating high quality films. Italian films always receive awrds in Cannes Film Festival yearly which Spanish language films fail to achieve.

In fact Hindi films are more popular worldwide than Spanish language films.

Guest Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:11 pm GMT

<<Again Guest69, that was a fair assesment of the situation today. Thanks for the insight.

For French speakers that can't read Spanish so well, he wasn't bashing French at all, but simply being realistic about the trends of languages in the world today. Also, he pointed out that French and Spanish aren't really in any direct conflict for superiority anywhere. That is left to other languages.

I think that the only neutral place where there could be a conflict between Fr and Sp would be in US schools, but Spanish has already established itself as no.1 there. >>

Obvioulsy the message contains bashing remarks.

What the hell are you talikng about mac that the US is the neutral ground between French and Spanish? Europe and Asia are the most neutral not the US because obvioulsy those who studied Spanish in the US are mostly 2nd generations hispanics who did not learn to speak Spanish because they prefer English. Have some logic mac.

JLK Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:11 pm GMT

<<Va te faire foutre avec ta petite chiene, merde!>>

No need for that type of language, gentlemen.

joker Thu Mar 20, 2008 1:54 pm GMT

<< Ironically, Egypt is a member of La Francophonie not of Commonwealth and French is prefererred by many there over English because they fear that too much emphasis on English could kill their very own culture so French has a very strong presence there. >>

I don't get it. Why would focusing on French or any other European language be any better? They are all foreign languages. Besides, in my own personal experience, every Egyptian I've met abroad spoke English. SOME spoke French but ALL spoke English. Again, French fanatics are trying to claim a no.2 spot. I only met a few people from the Magreb (Moracco and Tunisia), and yes they spoke French...but also English, so obviously has decent popularity there as well.

<< What the hell are you talikng about mac that the US is the neutral ground between French and Spanish? >>

What I mean is that the US is an English speaking outside of Europe that could go more the Spanish route or the French route. It may have been different in the past, but that has changed, and the majority of students choose Spanish now. Although this is no doubt influenced by the neighboring region and the large Hispanic population. Hope that makes sense.

<< Europe and Asia are the most neutral >>

In Europe, French, German and English have been established as the big 3 for a long time now, so it is not really a neutral place. Asia would be the most neutral (non-Euro culture) but I wasn't thinking along those lines because English has already become the prefered foreign language almost everywhere in Asia.

<< not the US because obvioulsy those who studied Spanish in the US are mostly 2nd generations hispanics who did not learn to speak Spanish because they prefer English. Have some logic mac. >>

Well I do have logic, and you are the one who doesn't know what he is talking about. Some 2nd gens grow up with English and Spanish or English only. It depends on the situation. Do I know some 2nd gens who study Spanish? Yes. But the vast majority of students I know (including myself) are not hispanic. Either you are misinformed or are desperately trying to attack because you are upset the majority of students in the US (yes, even those of non-hispanic background) choose Spanish.

I studied in Mexico and Spain. In both places I met students from the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Denmark, Canada even Japan. And that's just from my own small personal experience.

Please don't get all defensive. As you can see I'm not attacking French. I'm just stating facts and my personal experiences.